250 lbs of Silly Putty at Google

For kicks some guy at Google ordered 1/8 of a ton of Silly Putty. Much fun ensues.

Guido at Google

Guido van Rossum, inventor of Python, language architect, former resident of Reston, Virginia and all around funny guy is now at Google. Looks like Elemental Security needs to change their staff page(scroll to very bottom).

Hilarious mock-umentory on Sushi

A hilarious mock-u-mentory on eating Sushi. The occasional schematic overlays and the over-drenching of the nigiri is classic.

Quicktime 7 is a buggy POS or...

All I want to do is watch the new Pixar Cars teaser trailer, but having recently "upgraded" to Quicktime 7, the audio output is a jerky, scratchy piece of shit. Apparently, I'm the not only one experiencing this. It appears to be OS-independent which suggests a problem with the codec.

(sigh)

Time to do a downgrade and roll-back to QT 6.

Alton's new website

Woot! Mr. Brown has finally taken the plunge and re-designed his very, very aged website. Promises of podcasts and other such goodies to come.

Paul Graham on "Web 2.0"

As usual, Mr. Graham is spot-on with his analysis. I do feel that "Don't Maltreat Users" is a wee bit harsh. Afterall, the challenge in the boom years was getting something/anything to work let alone worrying about usability/design issues. I'm not knocking usability, but if the application doesn't even run properly (ala' Ask Jeeves) or doesn't have sufficient uptime, who cares if the screen scales or if your being too burdensom on your users with intrusive ads and/or registration systems.

Don't skip the footnotes either. Some good gems of wisdom and links lie therein.

not jonsing for 'da king

Even though it's by Peter Jackson and has gotten rave reviews, I don't have any desire whatsoever to see King Kong. Strange.

Taking the day "off"

I'm doing my annual laptop rebuild today (workstation, firewall, and fileserver will be later this month) along with some other sys-admin duties. For the most part, this means that my higher brain functions will go largely unutilized as I de-volve into a button-monkey. I've got new cell phone, a game-boy micro, and City of Heros to keep me occupied between running installs and config scripts.

For those curious as to what the general procedure is, I'll refer you to this little gem composed by Mark in '03.

Sadly, not much has changed on the XP side of things other than the additional steps of disabling some of the 'features' in SP2.

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Odeo redesign/redirection

It seems that Odeo is no-longer the "Podcasting Portal" company, but has shifted its focus to enabling podcast production via a suite of podcast creation and sharing tools. It makes sense given that Apple's iTunes kinda' owns this space now. It's kinda' hard to bill yourself as a competative service provider when the very service name itself (podcasting) is branded with your competitor's product line. Kudos to Evan for recognizing the need for the business model shift and switching gears mid-stride gracefully. Good website redesign too. A re-design which actually removes cruft and is simplier--what a concept.

Web 2.0 checklist

Not to be too 'Weekly Standardish' or "Business 2.0ish", but here's a nice high-level checklist for properties your "Web 2.0" app should likely have.

Please no emails regarding the fact that the list itself is being published using one of these so-called "Web 2.0" apps.

1. I don't think it needs to be built with Rails--this is the Web afterall. Rails just happens to be the "sexy app-stack of-the-year".
2. In many so-called Ajax-sprinked apps I've seen, they sacrifice REST---not a good idea
3. I haven't seen that many examples of BIG FONTS
4. Yellow Fade rocks, thanks 37Signals

Using CSS for Hard-Copy

For those interested in using CSS for more than just web page formatting--it IS afterall a generic stylesheet language, check out the most recent article at A List Apart for publishing CSS-based books with the "Boom" micro-format.

For more serious jobs, check out Prince. It's about 3,000 USD for a full license, but the trial version is free and it lets you go quite seemlessly to professionally publishable PDF. In short, Prince is XML + CSS = PDF and can even be deployed for report generation for server-side processing. I think a good next step here is to define a nice XML-RPC set for Prince so that I can call it as Web Service w/o all of the complexity of a full-blown SOAP interface. I'm not knocking SOAP, but XML-RPC is a better 'first-step' here. Once that's working, one can always 'port-up' to a finer-grained SOAP implementation.